ILT

Last week we had an ILT. This ILT was about changing bodies, puberty, friendship and friendship issues. My favorite part of the ILT was the physical theater.

We had to walk around randomly, and then our Drama teacher, told us to get into groups of 4. My group was a group of five. Luke, Bash, Daniel and Daniel were in my group. We had to choose a topic on Google Classroom and then there would be a folder of songs inside. The topics were Self Image, Family Relationships, Overcoming Hardships and Friendships. We chose Overcoming Hardships and the song in that folder that we chose was Bob Marley - Get Up Stand Up, which only Bash and Luke wanted to do, but when we tried to pick another song we were asked if it linked to our lives or something going on in our lives and we all said no. so then we were told to do the Bob Marley song even though that didn't really have a meaning either. But the rest of us dealt with. Then we had to come up with the moves and practice and on Friday we had to perform. We got an hour or 2 on Wednesday and 1 Hour or so on Thursday and 5 minutes to revise just before the performance on Friday.

The rest of the ILT was just talks. We had a talk with Mr Preston, Matthew, Roger and Cyndi. Mr Preston's talk was about changing bodies and hormones, Matthew's was about Self Image, and I can't really remember what Roger's was about because some of the boys in our group just wouldn't be quiet and wouldn't let Roger speak that much. But what I did hear from him, it was about friendships. Cyndi was talking about how you solve friendship problems and gave us a small task to do.

I think this ILT could have been improved by more activities because there was only one activity, and that was the physical theater.

Email Etiquette

In IT we've been doing this task on how to write a proper email, how to write an email to your teacher, and what the difference is between an email to your teacher and your friend. We had to first listen to a video that would teach us about email etiquette, and then we had to write 5 points to remember when writing an email to a teacher. Then we all wrote an email to our teacher asking her a question about anything school related. This was to kind of test to see if we used those 5 points when we were writing to our teacher. I don't think I learnt much from this because I already do these things when I email a teacher.

Reading Wonder

This year in English, we've been reading this book called Wonder. This book is about a boy named August or "Auggie" who has a facial deformity, and how he deals with it and what happens to him when he starts his first year of school in grade 5.

When we read this book I noticed that straight away when he was going for the tour of the school Julian started being mean to him. He didn't even get to know him he  just started being mean to him because of his facial deformity. I could kind of tell that Julian was going to be the worst bully, although a lot of other people were also bullying him, I could guess from the start of the book that Julian wasn't really going to change his attitude towards Auggie. It also stood out to me at how Jack changed from being Julian's friend and bullying Auggie, to notice what he was doing is wrong and become Auggie's friend. Also when Jack said at the Halloween party that if he had Auggie's face he'd kill himself. That was a big shocker for me because I thought that Jack and Auggie's friendship was going well, but I think that when Jack said that it was a heat of the moment thing where he just agrees with what the people around him are saying. But I'm glad that they became friends again after that. I think the story has changed me in the way that you should never judge a book by it's cover, which I don't do, because you dont know what they've gone through. You shouldn't judge someones life on the chapter you stepped in. I think in the story I would be Amos because I don't need  to know someone or be their friend to stand up for them.

I really recommend this book to teens because there's are a lot of life advice and wisdom in this book.

Superhero Stop-Motion Project

A few months ago, we were given a project in which we would complete in Art and Design &Technology and just a bit in English. In this project we had to first decide if we were in pairs or not and if we were, we had to ask the person you wanted to be with if they wanted to be with you. Then, we had to design and think about our character and the villain (if we had one) his powers and abilities, his motivation, his clothing, his symbol, the link to their name and the colour scheme. Then we drew them on A4 pieces of paper and labeled him. After that we had to think about the storyboard and what the dialog would be for the storyboard. We did this task in English. In Art after we designed our background, we started to draw it with blue koki. Then we painted our background in which took a few lessons. Then in Technology, we all sat down at one table and talked about the do's and dont's of the making of the character. We would be making our character out of Plasticine but we weren't allowed to make the villain or anything else with their Plasticine. After a few lessons of that, we finished and we started to record in the stop- motion app. We are still recording but when we do finish, we have one more thing to do, Voice-Overs. This is were the dialogue comes into play. Our "Hand in of Final Stop-Motion" is on the 11th of August, 2017, different classes have different due days. But just because it seems very far away doesn't doesn't mean that we have loads of time. We have 2 hours a week because we have Art for an hour and Technology for an hour. We do have English a lot, but the English part of the project is done so we only have Tech and Art to do it.

Instant Messaging Guidelines

In our last few IT lessons, we were focusing on instant messaging guidelines and talking about how the person the you're texting can't see your facial expression or tone. After we had that short discussion, we were given a task to do. In this task we would make a poster on how messaging can go wrong, and just a few sentences explaining the guidelines. A few minutes ago, they just came up during our IT lesson so that we could explain it to them and answer their questions. One person in our class would be paired with someone from the grade 4's class. This was to help them because apparently there were a few issues with them not understanding the tone that the other person was using or taking the message in the wrong way because they can't see the other person's facial expression.

                Created in Google Drawings

Poetry ILT

Last week, at our school, all the grade 6s took part in a ILT. The ILT started on Wednesday and ended on Friday. ILT stands for Integrated Learning Task. For this particular ILT we were all put into groups of 3. But i was in a group of 4, because we have 20 in our class so one group had to be a group of 4. So this ILT was an English one, and we did poetry. In one of the tasks we each had to select a style of writing our poem and and a theme, then write it. The options were  Haiko, Colour poem, Cinquain, Limerick, Acrostic poem and a Concrete poem. Out of all of these, I chose the color poem. If you don't know what a color poem is, you should google it and find out, but I'll give you a picture. Our groups theme was a Wave This was my poem:

Turquoise

Turquoise is swift, just like a wave.

Turquoise feels like a relief of stress.

Turquoise smells like the ocean.

Turquoise is a calm, swift movement.

Turquoise tastes like bubblegum ice-cream.

We had 5 tasks to do as a group and 1 task to do individually. We had a poetry slam on Friday, where our whole group had to think of one theme and each have lines to present to the grade as a group. ours  was about the dark.

The Dark

Noah

The night is dark and silent

Nothing to be heard

Nothing to do

Nowhere to go

Nothing to see

Sean

It's dark, it's scary, and it's not a dream.....

UNLESS someone is with me, in the dark...

If that was the case I'd feel safer.... But WATCHED....

Sometime I wonder if people watch over me in the dark, BUT ILL NEVER KNOW

Because I'm in the dark

Reef

It is so quiet

Actually to quite

My brothers at college

My parents are away

I can hear scratching on the wall

Brendan

I see green eyes

Some thing ran down the hall

This is creeping me out

And I heard something fall

Also, The eyes are back at my door

If you're wondering what was in the dark, it was a cat.

Our English teacher let our group do it in assembly which was on that same day just later on. A few other groups also did this. Another exciting thing that's coming up tomorrow until Friday is camp! The whole grade is going on camp. we just figured out who's in who's cabins. I'm with Max, Calum, Luke S, Bash, Ollie, Zac M and myself. I'm just so excited!

My 2017 so far!

I can't believe 2016 is gone! I feel like everything that happened in 2016 was just yesterday... Hopefully my 2017 will be just as good, if not, better than my 2016 was! I've been liking grade 6 so far, same with 2017. This year I think I just need to do better in Afrikaans... I also want to focus on my sport as well. I also want to work much harder and get honors again this year. I also want to learn French this year so that when someone French starts talking to me, I don't have to say "Sorry I don't speak French.". I also want to focus on my speed, and athletics. I also want to be more confident during orals and I want to use much more expression. I also want to try to learn some new things this year. I think I'm going to like all of my teachers this year. Mr. Walker is really fun and makes us laugh a lot in class! Mrs. Copeland also makes me laugh and is very nice. Mrs Calitz is very nice as well. Mrs. Kent is a really cool teacher as well. All my teachers seem to be really fun this year, which I hope means this year will be fun too! The classes also seem like they're really interesting. I think 2017 will be a year to remember!